Energy democratisation through agrivoltaics? The territorialisation dynamics of community-based energy governance in Japan

Abstract The recent ‘solar turn’ has led to an increased techno-economic materialisation of community-based energy governance (CEG), which may have the effect of reducing its transformative potential to attain democratic and just energy transitions. Although some studies have re-examined the transformative potential of CEG, there still remains a research gap regarding the role of agrivoltaics in shaping CEG. Drawing upon practices in Japan, one of the earliest countries to adopt agrivoltaics on a practical basis, this research aims to address the gap by demonstrating how the transformative potential of CEG is entangled with the particularity of the technology. In so doing, we utilise a conceptual framework of energy democracy informed by the works of Deleuze and Guattari. This framework attends to the ongoing dynamics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in the process of ‘becoming-democratic’, rather than essentialising specific characteristics of CEG. To unpack the socio-material configuration in the context of agrivoltaic CEG in Japan, we first show how the way the community is envisioned is contingent upon the choice of technology by building on 66 semi-structured interviews with CEG-related stakeholders throughout the country. To gain further insights into the practical manifestations, we examine a purportedly successful agrivoltaic CEG in Chiba Prefecture as a case study. Based on the evidence, we show that, contrary to the idealised potential of agrivoltaic CEG to deterritorialise the energy governance, the specific characteristics of agrivoltaics embedded in the spatial configurations, can also hinder the deterritorialisation of energy governance, as well as allowing its reterritorialisation.